Sloane Crosley’s first book — a collection of essays titled I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead Books) — has already debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. (You can read Wendy Walker’s review on the site today.) But Miss Crosley’s storytelling skills are boundless: To help illustrate some of the essays in her debut, she created dollhouse-styled dioramas out of Plexiglas. “In a way, these dioramas began long before I started writing the essays they represent,” writes Crosley on her website. “That would be in 4th grade. At least 4th grade is my first real memory of a Crosley Family diorama, though I feel certain there were labor-intensive crafts projects prior to that. Dioramas like the ones we built simply don’t appear from nowhere without a background of meticulous creativity. Either way, it was a fun extraction and one which allowed for a lot of inadvertent glue-sniffing.”

Check out an exclusive Sloane Crosley diorama video from the essay “Smell This,” a story about three college friends who she’s lost touch with. While hanging around her apartment, catching up, one of them leaves a surprise she won’t soon forgot.